Lingering in Doorways

As I dive for the juice box, closing the distance with short, stubby fingers, the plane I am on dips with me. The crowd shudders in response: a chorus of swaying heads and clumsy, stumbling footsteps. I pause, mostly out of habit, when the seatbelt light flickers on. Isn’t this the part of the movie where the engines collapse, where the wings are slashed by lasers and we plummet through the air? Somewhere, I think, in some parallel universe, a flying cape must be on its way. Its owner must be barrelling through distant storms to get to us. When the plane eventually stills, hands steadying to pass out breakfast menus and warm towelettes, I cannot help the soft pang of disappointment.

I was five the first time I decided I needed to be fictional. It made sense at the time, a reasonable aspiration, built from a childhood weaned on twenty-four-hour Disney Channel. My parents, who moved to the United States in the early ‘00s, manned a video rental store in Buena Park, and so the earliest memories of my life have me nestled between A to Zs (Adam Sandler classics and “Zathura: A Space Adventure”), premiering the first High School Musical on the store’s tiny TV. There was nothing more exciting to me than the world beyond that small screen, where the images were crisp and new and somehow more alive, a more exciting alternative to the calm suburban life we settled into. In front of that silver box I could go anywhere, be anyone. It was a dangerous little nook for a kid that wanted to feel invincible.And I was, for a time. It’s surprisingly easy to feel powerful at five. When you’re five the world is endless and inviting, stretching all the way to the next block and then some. There is still so much in it that you are yet to know. Even back then I had this greedy curiosity; a wild, relentless imagination. When my lolo, a retired colonel, would visit us from the Philippines, he would bounce me on his knee and tell me about his job in the task force. I loved the idea of a policeman, the big guy. In my head I unfolded the adventures that earned him his rank, chasing masked assailants too clueless to know any better. My brain supplied the rest: a blaring sun and scorched, battle-scarred fields. My lolo, ever the hero in this story, would be pouncing on bad guy after bad guy, slapping on handcuffs left and right. His bravery fueled mine: I began to want, more than anything, to become just like him. Undefeatable. My own kind of action figure.

And yet, as far as origin stories go, mine didn’t seem to be packed with as much adventure. Which was fine, I reminded myself, suiting up for another Taekwondo class — plenty of heroes come from the ordinary. I think of the next few years in a supercut: ten years old, fitted inside a bathroom cubicle with my pre-packed lunch, willing myself to be invisible, to disappear — poof! — into nothing. Thirteen, back when the most important thing in the world was to shrink into extra-smalls, when I felt my most accomplished guzzling Coke Zeros on an empty stomach. Seventeen and rifling through college applications, when the world felt too large and I too unimportant, wanting nothing more than to expand myself into something that could take up space, something that could be seen. My life — the harder parts of it, at least — was defined by my mediocrity, a truth that despite my best efforts, no character arc could redeem.

Every day I am learning that there are things in this world that I cannot control. There are rules in life that I cannot defy yet, forces still spun out of my reach. Every day is yet another day of holding out for some well-timed deus ex machina, a wise old mentor popping up on my doorstep, but the wish always ends up falling flat somehow, a retelling of a borrowed trope. Time and time again I’m reminded of my humanity, that my problems cannot be whisked away by the deft flick of a wrist.

This isn’t a new story. This is the truth: I’m stuck with the space I have now, with the body I am provided, in a life with an expiration date. I am not immortal. I can’t freeze time or tell the future. My strengths — my creativity, my passion, the things I love most about myself — might not require masks and skin-tight spandex, but maybe they are just as important, just as great. Just as needed.

My life ends the way all lives do; it is up to me to figure out what to with it. In the end, it is my job to make it count. There is so much fight still left in me, so much potential to become something more. I am ready to leave my mark.

The ground beneath me rumbles again, and I jolt back. Tonight I am skating down a different skyline, where the days cut into each other and interlock into longitudes and latitudes, the in-between of worlds. Beneath me, impossibly wide, sleeps the ocean. Outside the sky shifts from day-blue to pitch-black, punctured by a billion startling pinpricks of white. One billion wishing machines to choose from.

I take a moment to settle back into my seat and smile. Right now, in this moment, I have no need of them. I have all the power in the world.